The 15th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON-2018) will be held at Punjabi University, Patiala during December 15-18, 2018. The ICON Conference series is a forum for promoting interaction among researchers in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computational Linguistics (CL) in India and abroad. The main conference is on December 16-17, 2018. This will be preceded by one day of pre-conference tutorials on December 15, 2018 and one day of post conference workshops on December 18, 2018.
Papers in ICON proceedings will be indexed in ACL Anthology. ACL Anthology is a digital archive of research papers in Computational Linguistics for major international conferences under Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), which is one of the most well-known associations for NLP and CL. The previous proceedings of ICON 2014, ICON 2015, ICON2016, and ICON 2017 can be found in ACL Anthology.

The authors have to submit papers under any of the areas mentioned above and must mark the topic(s) of their paper at the time of submission.

FORMAT OF SUBMISSION
Papers in English, not exceeding 8 pages, should be submitted on the ONLINE PORTAL at Microsoft CMT. Papers should include an abstract of about 100-200 words. Please follow the paper submission template details described in next section.
There are two tracks: one for the main conference and one for the Student Paper Competition. You should select one of these while submitting the paper (not both). Similarly, Choose NLP Software Contest option for sending abstract for it.DOUBLE BLIND REVIEW:
Papers in electronic form in the PDF format, anonymous for double blind review, should be submitted. If your paper contains text of languages other than English, all the non English text should be in Unicode only.
Paper Submission Template
Submission is electronic, using the Microsoft CMT. The submission site is open at:
https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ICON2018
Long/short paper submissions must use the official ACL 2018 style templates. Long papers must not exceed eight (8) pages of content. Short papers must not exceed four (4) pages of content. References do not count against these limits.
LaTeX (acl_natbib.bst updated 18th February)
Microsoft Word
Style files were updated on 14th April, 2018 to clarify the location of supplementary material. All submissions must be in PDF format and must conform to the official style guidelines, which are contained in these template files.
Templates links
acl2018.org/downloads/acl18-latex.zip
acl2018.org/downloads/acl_natbib.bst
acl2018.org/downloads/acl18-word.zip

CALL FOR TUTORIALS/WORKSHOPS
Proposals are invited for pre-conference tutorials/workshops. Tutorials/Workshops can be of half-day or full-day duration. The proposal should be presented in the form of a 200-word abstract, one page topical outline of the content, description of the proposers and their qualifications relating to the tutorial content.
Workshops on linguistic aspects of South Asian languages are also welcome.
Send tutorial/workshop proposals to the ICON-2018 Secretariat by email iconnlp@pbi.ac.in . For further information, please refer to the Conference URL or contact the ICON-2018 Secretariat.

NLP Software Contest
The NLP Software contest, which is being held for first time in ICON, is intended to encourage and promote the development of NLP related software. The researchers, software developers and educators working in development of NLP software are invited to participate in the contest, by submitting a one page abstract of their software. Only independently running complete systems are eligible for the contest. Small Modules or tools developed for NLP Research or integration with larger systems will not be considered. Entries will be selected for inclusion in the conference program based on peer-review. The criteria for judging submissions include broad applicability and potential impact, novelty, technical depth, demo suitability, and other miscellaneous factors. Authors of selected entries will be invited to present and demonstrate their software in a special session in the conference program. To encourage the development of NLP software, the best three software entries, as judged by reviewers and the program committee, will be awarded cash prize as follows:

FIRST PRIZE: Rs.10,000/-
SECOND PRIZE: Rs.7,500/-
THIRD PRIZE: Rs.5,000/-
The abstracts for this contest may be submitted at https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ICON2018
For any clarifications, contact NLP Software Contest Chair.
STUDENT PAPER COMPETITION IN LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGIES
ICON-2018 announces STUDENT PAPER COMPETITION in two tracks:
Track I : NLP (All areas)
Track II : Linguistics (Morphology, Syntax and Semantics)
Papers may be submitted under the link on the web page. Prizes will be awarded in each track based on original work carried out. The prizes are:
FIRST PRIZE: Rs.10,000/-
SECOND PRIZE: Rs.7,500/-
THIRD PRIZE: Rs.5,000/-
The short-listed papers in each track will be invited for presentation in a special session in the conference. Registration, domestic travel and subsistence expenses will be provided by the conference organizers for one author of each paper. Up to two winners will be offered summer fellowships at major NLP Centres in India. For any clarifications, contact Student Paper Competition Chair on iconnlp@pbi.ac.in